Sunday, July 19, 2009

End Of An Era

Random Pop Culture:

6AM marks the official end of local DC radio station WJFK. I've listened to WJFK since very soon after its inception in 1991, when I was fourteen years old. For all of that time, the station has been a constant, every weekday. Times change, business is business, I understand. But I still lament its passing and I'm a free agent for the afternoon drive home. The upside of personality-driven radio is that you create rabidly loyal listeners. The downside is that when those personalities go away, the listeners go just as quickly.

Watched the most recent X-Files movie this morning. The play between Duchovny and Anderson was strong, but the movie focused on that to the detriment of everything else. The plot was entirely unintelligible. They show a newspaper at the headline to let you know what the bad guy was up to, but I'm still not totally sure.

Man, Entourage is at the top of its game, as good as it's ever been. Great writing, great acting, continued development of characters that would be fine as static caricatures. It's on fire.

Random Hatred and/or Love:

As I continue my Civil War reading, I like to think about the various characters' personalities in terms of what it would be like to play poker with them. George McClellan you could push around -- he was extraordinarily timid and perpetually overestimated his opponent. The South's PTG Beauregard would be easy to trap -- overconfident, lying to his superiors and to himself about his (wrongly) perceived success. But Grant? I wouldn't want to sit at a table with him. Unaffected by any craziness going on around him, always thinking levelly, and always extremely aggressive strategically, Grant would be my least favorite kind of player to match up against.

Random Lost Question:

Still going with the rewatch and nearing the end of the first season. I think of it as such a good show because I'm so invested in the mysteries, but I forget that it really is a very good show. I still have most of a season of Mad Men to catch up on by the middle of next month, but we keep watching old episodes of Lost that we've already seen instead. So the question that occurred to me regarding the season five finale. Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are the "chosen ones," so to speak. They were on Jacob's list, they (Jack and Kate) flashed back to 1977 (along with Hurley and Sayid, who had both been visited by Jacob during their Oceanic Six time), they are likely the subject of the, "They're coming," that Jacob whispered at the end, much to his adversary's apparent shock and horror. Makes sense, since they were visited by Jacob before they even got to the island. You can make the case that John, also visited early, wasn't kidnapped because he holds a different special role, whether it's as Ben's successor or as the evil pawn. But, Sun and Jin also met Jacob before they got to the island, at their wedding. So why didn't Sun go back to 1977? Why weren't she or Jin on Jacob's list?

1 comment:

I will miss WJFK in a way I couldn't have imagined a few years ago. I've been a faithful Don & Mike / Mike O'Meara Show listener for almost as long as you. The real change came when they first started podcasting a few segments, and then streaming, and finally full show podcasting. Once we hit that point, I barely ever missed a topic on any of the shows on the station. Once they got to full show, I didn't miss a single segment, especially over the past 18 month. It's going to leave a huge hole for me; however, it's going to let me add back in The Adam Carolla podcast and stuff like that. I tip my 40 to the memories of TMOS and Big O & Dukes.